


Song of Cassandra

by LittleDarlingXOX



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman and Robin (Comics), Detective Comics (Comics), Nightwing (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Barbara Gordon (mentioned) - Freeform, Brotherly Bonding, Bruce Wayne's A+ Parenting, Canonical Character Death, Cassandra Cain (mentioned) - Freeform, Child Neglect, Duke Thomas is Signal, Duke Thomas is a Batfamily Member, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Family Drama, Family Issues, Found Family, Good Grandparent Alfred Pennyworth, Post-Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, Protective Older Brothers, Stephanie Brown is Spoiler, Team as Family, The Heretic - Freeform, harper row (mentioned) - Freeform, protective older siblings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28165158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleDarlingXOX/pseuds/LittleDarlingXOX
Summary: What is Batman without a Robin? Everyone in the family makes jokes about the ‘dead robins club’, but Dick and Jason really do have measures set in place for the day Bruce loses sight of what’s really important. They won’t let Bruce sacrifice another Robin for the cause, even if that means separating Robin from Batman for good.
Relationships: Barbara Gordon/Dick Grayson, Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Damian Wayne, Dick Grayson & Jason Todd, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Stephanie Brown & Bruce Wayne, Stephanie Brown/Tim Drake
Comments: 10
Kudos: 71





	Song of Cassandra

“To select a victim, to adorn it, and to drive it towards the enemies to be killed by them in time of crisis - such is the ancient rite of substitution.” — _The War That Killed Achilles_ by Caroline Alexander

The bone-saw pinwheeled through the air and smashed into the stone facade beside them. The event wouldn’t have been nearly so noteworthy if Dick hadn’t just yanked Damian out of its path only a second ago.

“Hey, Robin,” Jason called, “get your head in the game before you lose it completely!”

In front of them, Red Hood had swapped out his dual guns for a set of brass knuckles. All around him the Dollotrons and their improvised weapons fell to the ground. 

_Not helping, Jason_.

Robin’s domino mask hid multitudes behind its whiteout lenses. Dick read what he could from the pinched lines of Damian’s mouth and the taut muscles in his neck which trembled through each unsteady swallow. He could feel the effort it was taking him to reign it in.

“Robin, you good?” He placed a hand on the kid’s shoulder and tried to draw his attention back from wherever his mind had just drifted off to. It wasn’t the first time that he’d asked that question tonight and he doubted that it would be the last.

“Fine,” Damian replied but jerked free of his grip with a suddenness that could only mean his pride had been bruised. 

Damian snatched the fallen bone-saw up off the pavement and hurled it back into the mass of flailing limbs where it sliced deep into a Dollotron’s shoulder and sent the man staggering.

“Incapacitate only, Robin!” Batman’s voice boomed over the noise of the brawl unfolding before them. 

The hope was that they could save at least a few of Professor Pyg’s failed creations if they got them prompt medical attention. Robin, however, had been one-step behind the entire evening—breaking with their predetermined strategies and acting on reflex more than anything. Dick could only chalk so much up to rustiness from being out of the field. 

As Robin ducked back into the fray, he had no choice but to follow him in the hopes of preventing further bloodshed. It was going to be a long night.

* * *

Back in the cave, he watched Damian unbuckle the utility belt from his waist, his uniform glowing brightly in the cave’s dim interior. His movements were calm, but the distracted look in his eyes betrayed him outright. It was much too soon for him to be back in the field after his death at the hands of the Heretic and subsequent resurrection and it showed on patrol this evening. 

Dare he say it, but tonight Robin was... _sloppy_ . And didn’t that just make it worse, he thought to himself, remembering Jason’s muttered comment earlier that night, _you can’t blame Damian, the last thing he wants to do is disappoint his father._

Well, what the hell was a kid supposed to do when Batman was your father? 

Dick’s gaze cut to Bruce at the Batcomputer, oblivious to everything except finishing up his report of the night’s mission. He wanted to chuck an escrima stick at his stupid pointy head. But no matter how satisfying that would feel in the moment, it wouldn’t be productive. So instead Dick did the adult thing and waited impatiently for Damian and Tim to change out of their gear and head to their respective beds to sleep away the rest of the dark hours. 

When they were alone with nothing but the clicking of keyboard keys to fill the silence, Dick cast a final confirmative glance Jason’s way. Jason raised his arm and tapped at the imaginary watch on his wrist. 

It was now or never. “Bruce, can we talk for a sec?”

Bruce turned in his chair and faced him. “About what?”

He took a breath and forced the words out before his confidence failed him. “I don’t think Damian should be back in the field.”

Bruce held up his hands, his expression transforming from mild to exhausted in a fraction of a second. “Dick, no. We’ve discussed this. I’m not having this conversation again.”

 _Again_ , he said, like he’d ever really taken the time to listen to him the first time around. 

“You agreed to give him time! We only just got him back and already you’re putting him back in the line of fire?” 

He’d thought that would have been the last thing that Bruce would have done. They’d all witnessed how Damian’s death had driven Bruce to the edge, Jason especially. It had taken hours of persistence to get Jason to even agree to come here, let alone stand with him on this, after the stunt Bruce had pulled in Ethiopia. 

Bruce sighed and squeezed the bridge of his nose tightly. “I’m not putting him anywhere. I put the decision up to Damian and he told me he felt ready to put the uniform back on.”

Those walls that Damian had started to lower during their time working together were back up now that his father was around, but not before the damage had already been done. Dick had glimpsed the vulnerable side of Damian that just wanted to prove his worth. He couldn’t stand by and watch the kid get hurt, even if he had to step on Bruce’s toes to do it. 

Jason pushed off the clothing lockers that he’d been leaning against for the past ten minutes and walked up behind Dick’s shoulder. “You sure he really meant that? Or was he just saying what he thought you wanted to hear?”

Bruce’s face was quickly losing its composure. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, he was raised knowing he was the son of Talia al Ghul and Batman. Not Bruce Wayne— _Batman._ He might not think he has a choice in putting on the cape unless someone tells him otherwise.”

“And you think I didn’t?” snapped Bruce. As quick as that anger appeared, it was snuffed out just as fast and replaced with a measured response. “Robin is the one thing that gives Damian purpose. I won’t take that away from him.”

“Can you honestly say that his actions tonight didn’t worry you?” asked Jason. “He can take down Dollotrons with his eyes closed, but tonight he was distracted almost to the point of defenselessness. If we didn’t tag along and babysit him the entire patrol he might have ended up in the med bay or worse.”

“I think it’s understandable that he’s having some trouble adjusting.”

 _Adjusting_ , Dick wanted to scream. _Did you see the look on your kid’s face out there? He’s not adjusting to anything_. 

Jason sighed and rubbed at the back of his neck. “C’mon, B. You know I don’t stick my nose in things unless they’re serious. This is serious. We’re worried about him.”

Bruce glanced between them, eyeing them both critically. “Think back to when you both were Robin. Would you have appreciated someone coming in and telling me to bench you because they thought you weren’t ready for the role? Without even taking into consideration how you might feel about the matter.”

“We aren’t saying that—” said Dick. 

“Are you sure? Because it seems like you only just made this mistake with Tim.

The comment hit Dick like a slap to the face. “That was an entirely different situation—”

“You took Robin away from Tim when you thought he wasn’t in a position to handle the job anymore and gave it to Damian. Now you’re trying to take it away from Damian.”

“Robin was my mantle,” Dick said slowly, an anger months in the making rising in him. “I created it and I’m so _sick_ of you telling me what bearing that name means or who that uniform gets passed down to like I don’t have any say in it! Especially with Damian. When you ‘died’ you left him with nothing. He was your blood son but you never bothered to give him a place in this family beyond that. So you want to talk about Damian’s place and his _purpose?_ Well, I gave those to him, not you.”

_He thought you were going to be the one to take Robin away from him. He was so scared that his place in your legacy would be erased the moment you returned, despite all the work he had put in to change his nature._

Bruce was in his chair one second and standing over Dick in the next. “Despite what you might still believe, you’re no longer his guardian nor are you his mentor. You gave up the right to parent my child when I came back from the dead. I’m Batman and it’s time for you to go back to being Nightwing. Understood?”

 _Go back to not having a say, you mean,_ Dick thought to himself, remembering a time when all he wanted to do was go back to being Nightwing—to not have to make the hard choices. But not anymore. He’d been Batman and had a Robin of his own and those protective instincts don’t just magically turn off with a snap of the fingers. 

_Sometimes I feel the need to protect him, even from you._

“I said _is that clear_?” Over four years since he’d worn the uniform and taken orders from Batman, but Dick’s body still jumped to attention like it did when he was Robin. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that even Jason wasn’t immune to that tone of voice. 

He absolutely hated it.

“Crystal.” 

Bruce’s cape whipped him in the legs on his way out. 

“C’mon, get changed,” Jason placed a hand on his shoulder and nodded his head towards the exit, “I’ll buy you a drink.” 

It would take more than a year for him to realize he should have tried harder.

* * *

By the time Jason shoved into his apartment and kicked the door shut behind him, it was two hours short of daybreak. He jerked to a halt when he caught sight of him sitting in his living room, and clutched his apartment keys in one limp fist. 

“Hey,” he said, voice a rough croak.

Dick stood up to greet him. “Sorry. I didn’t think to text you and I had a key—”

He paused when he caught sight of Jason’s face illuminated under the overhead lights. “What happened to you? I thought you went to talk to Steph.”

“I did,” Jason dropped his keys in the bowl by the front door. “Or at least I tried to. She was more interested in hitting something than having a heart to heart.”

It was too soon after Tim’s funeral for Stephanie to be back in the field. Even, Kate had suggested that Bruce intervene before someone got hurt on the job. Dick had wanted to laugh at her choice of phrase. _Hurt?_ Didn’t she realize that the reason they were in this situation in the first place was because the stakes had risen _way_ past that already?

Still, they all knew it was no good to try to force yourself back into the vigilante lifestyle before you were ready. Damian had proven that only a year or so ago and Gotham’s citizens had borne the brunt of his mistake. So Bruce had tried to step in, but it felt like all he’d really succeeded in doing was pouring salt into the gaping wound that Tim’s death had rent into their little family of heroes. 

_I’m so sick of you pretending like you care_. Dick remembered the way Steph had flung those words at Bruce just hours ago. _You only care when people can forgive you. Because all you really care about is continuing your stupid fucking mission!_

Dick could already make out the puffy bruised skin that circled his right eye and colored his cheekbone a dark purple. “Right, so the obvious conclusion was to offer up yourself as her human punching bag.”

“Better me than Bruce.” 

Just the idea of it made him sad. Jason and his stupid martyr complex. The kicked-puppy of the family. “I disagree.”

There was an image that Dick couldn’t get out of his head. It lurked in the back of his mind, even now. Steph’s features pulled tight from anger and grief, her icy eyes staring holes into Bruce as she spat out, _You keep pretending to care about me to what? Absolve you for what happened to Tim? Well, I don’t, Batman. I don’t absolve you!_

No, it should have been Bruce that bore the brunt of her violence. Bruce who sported a fractured cheekbone for the following week, a consistent reminder of his failings. Not his little brother who had warned them all time and time again about Bruce’s bad habits and all of the endless justifications he had to explain them away. Not Jason, who’d said Bruce shouldn’t be allowed to have sidekicks if he couldn’t keep them alive into adulthood—that if he wanted to fight crime so bad, let him, but keep the kids out of it.

Jason winced as he fingered the delicate skin around his eye. “We both know from past experience how unsatisfying it feels to go after him. It’s like punching a brick wall—he doesn’t give anything and it just ends up hurting you more in the long run.”

He knew Jason was right, but that still didn’t make it fair. 

Jason went to the freezer and pulled out a bag of frozen green beans which he pressed to his face with a relieved sigh. “What are you doing here, Dick?”

Jason never was one for small talk.

Dick stared at the bookshelf in the corner of Jason’s living, the titles on the spines were illegible to him all of a sudden like he was viewing them from a great distance. “Tim’s dead.”

“Yeah, I know. Alfred called me after it happened, same as you.”

“I can’t stop thinking about it.” Dick shook his head. “He was supposed to hang up the cape and go to college with Steph. I thought he was going to make it, but instead, he sacrificed himself on that rooftop for Bruce’s endless goddamn crusade.”

“Careful, Golden Boy. You’re sounding a little blasphemous there.”

“Good,” snapped Dick. “because I’m fucking angry. Angry that Bruce seems content to maintain the status quo while my siblings get blown up and stabbed and tortured.”

“You’re also grieving,” said Jason. “Which might explain why you’re slumming it around my place instead of spending time with Babs. When you work your way up to the bargaining stage I suggest trying Damian because I’m not helping you find a lazarus pit.”

“Fuck you,” he replied, but he couldn’t force any heat into the words. Not when his chest constricted again with that tight pain that stabbed at his lungs. He couldn’t stop the tears that pooled at the corners of his eyes and spilled over. 

When he glanced up at Jason, the other boy was nothing but a watery figure standing out against the dark room. “Those missiles incinerated Tim into a pile of ash. There’s no body _left_ for us to try to bring back this time.”

Jason squeezed his eyes shut tight like something was paining him. He didn’t go to Tim’s funeral, Dick remembered and wondered which stage of the grieving process he was on: denial or acceptance. Either way, it was clear that even he was having trouble hiding it behind that cock-sure snarky mask of his.

Jason shook his head slightly. “I think you should leave.”

“What?” Dick wiped furiously at his eyes. “Why?”

“Because I can’t tell you what you came over here to hear.”

“And what’s that?”

“That everything’s gonna be alright. That Bruce is gonna change his ways.” Jason shrugged and tossed the bag of beans on the counter. “He might change a bit… adapt like he’s done in the past. But it won’t happen fast enough to stop another Robin from dying on the job.”

“You don’t know that.” Dick wanted to punch him for how cruelly and casually he said it. 

“Don’t I?” Jason grabbed his Red Hood helmet up from where it rested on the kitchen counter and flung it at Dick’s chest like it was all the evidence he needed in the world. It was. “Just because you want someone to change, doesn’t mean they will.”

“Go to him with me. If we talk to him together we can make him listen—”

“The same way he listened to us before, with Damian? Like how he listened to Steph tonight? She yelled the harsh truth right in his face, even gave him an ultimatum. And she failed, just like you did, because the truth is that he doesn’t want to hear it.”

“We just have to try harder this time—” 

“Dick… please leave. I can’t do this with you right now and I won’t lie to you just to make you feel better.”

Dick threw Jason’s helmet onto the nearest piece of furniture. “You’re a piece of shit, you know that? I’m standing here trying to tell you that I need your help and you can’t even bring yourself to listen to me.”

“That’s because I’ve already learned this lesson. Just like Steph did tonight. And it’s a really simple one at that … if you love someone, you do what’s best for them even if it’s the hard choice. Damian, Cass, Steph, Duke… they won’t be ‘safe’ until they’re out of the lifestyle entirely. And it’s become increasingly clear that Bruce can’t, or won’t, give up being Batman so what makes you think he’s going to tell them to stop?”

Jason’s words were no different than the ones that occupied his thoughts of late. So why did it feel so much worse to hear them spoken out loud?

“I can’t lose another sibling, Jason. I won’t be able to take it. _Please…_ there’s got to be something we can do.”

Jason hesitated, his eyes dropping to the kitchen counter. The sky was starting to lighten as dawn approached. In the ever-shifting dim of his apartment, it felt like ages before Jason finally spoke again. “I want to show you something. Maybe it will help.” 

He walked past Dick to his bookcase and pulled a collection of books off the shelf, revealing a hole in the wall. “I started it about six months back for Steph. Her relationship with Bruce has always been rocky. I knew there might come a time when she went off to do the vigilante thing on her own.”

He reached in and pulled out a saran-wrapped package. “I wanted her to know that she had money waiting for her—to get a place of her own and new gear if she needs it.”

He tossed the package to Dick. It was a brick of cash, bundled into individual stacks with currency straps. Based on the various conditions of the bills it looks like Jason had swiped them during his many run-ins with Gotham’s criminal underbelly. 

“You saved all this for her?” asked Dick.

Jason paused in placing the books back on the shelf and shrugged. “Well, yeah. We know how hard it is to go it alone—the way you have to swallow your pride and values at a certain point because you need Bruce’s help, or money, or his connections. Steph deserves better than that. If she made the decision to leave the fold, I wanted her to go and not look back.”

Jason leaned against the edge of the bookshelf. “It’s not much when you’re coming from Bruce Wayne’s trust fund, but maybe we could start doing the same for the others; Damian, Cass, Harper, Duke... What do you think?”

“There’s certainly enough dirty operations in Gotham to fund it, but we’d need a better place to store it than a hole in your wall.”

Jason rolled his eyes. “Obviously.”

Dick’s mind was already racing with the possibilities. “And we don’t have to stop at cash. I’m sure we both have old safehouses that we don’t use and contacts with other superheroes and scientists that we can share—”

“Whoa, whoa! Dick…” Jason rubbed at his face. “What you’re talking about is building Batman’s resources from the ground up and not even that, doing it all in secret.”

“Are you saying we can’t do it?” asked Dick.

“Not necessarily—”

“Well if we have all the resources then why are we hesitating?” asked Dick. 

He held out his hand. “So are we doing this?”

Jason hesitated, then took his hand. “I guess I officially have to stop calling you Golden Boy now.”


End file.
